❦
SCREAM, NIGHTINGALE, SCREAM
II.
walk straight, look boldly
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Like always, Vika wasn't in camp.
Nor was she tucked above it in the forest's matted canopy of nooks and limbs, her shashka forged in the Don Cossack style across her legs, a hand-rolled cigarette balanced on her lips as she sharpened its half-curved blade.
That morning, she had selected a fir tree to roost in and hide from Lieutenant Bondarev's remarks about trying her for desertion. Warnings of a schism within the company and Taras's dissent were the only forces keeping her alive and instated, and she knew it.
Why else would she continue to vanish and therefore feed Bondarev's suspicions? Because she was a petty fool? Nobody could live like that. Not when Ukrainians were fighting themselves in factions. It'd be suicidal and stupid, and Vika was neither.
She was smart enough to sense she was a target and therefore had rigged a sound alarm at the base of her fir. If some careless soldier stepped into its wire perimeter, it would release a handful of brass bullet casings onto a well-placed stone. Metallic chimes would startle her horse, Solovey, into snorting or squealing, and she'd have the trespasser in her rifle sights before they took another breath.
Taras caught the wire's glimmer with the help of an eye that always seemed to fail him when it came to mine tripwires. He slid down Lastivka's flank at once to disarm it with nimble fingers and his scout's knife.
A slight silhouette observed him from a limb forked like a snake's tongue. It could have belonged to a rusalka if it didn't bear a headscarf of red and black drawn over corn-silk blonde braids. That detail alone confirmed it was Vika. She never went anywhere without the colors of Ukrainian blood and rich chernozem soil.
With a burst of dead leaves and the squelch of quenched ground, Vika landed before him on uneven feet. Solovey flinched at the movement. For such an intimidating creature, he was jittery. He shouldn't have been, not with his traits that conformed perfectly to the Don standard: muscular withers, broad joints, strong tendons. A white star on the crest of his chiseled head signified his status as Vika's most valuable asset.
"Comrade Captain," she said, mocking the generic Soviet form of address. "I overheard from a patrol that your dear friend Kovalenko paid you a visit."
Dear friend? Was that the rumor that was flying around? That he could tolerate a conversation with an apparatchik as slippery as Kovalenko?
"He did. Zarubin needs someone for an assignment," Taras said, relegating himself to her equal for the sake of progress. "Delirious as I was, I made the mistake of letting him convince me to volunteer for it."
"It's not a mistake if Ukraine needs you," Vika corrected in the only way she knew how: direct and without regard for authority. "But what exactly does it need you for?"
Taras had learned to expect such unorthodoxy from her, yet her subversions of military tradition still jarred him. As did the pair of wedding bands on her left hand. They made the company assume she had someone waiting back home for her—wherever that was.
Vika wasn't like the rest of the unit. Most of the men were nationalists' sons born in Volhynia or Galicia and raised in the swoop of a stallion's back, a revolver at their side. But Vika? She was a shadow from the steppe surrounding Novocherkassk, the Cossacks' capital city turned Soviet industrial stronghold.
"A morphine run," Taras answered.
"Why tell me?"
"Because you'd figure it out anyway and I need you, your mount, and your kit prepared to leave by dawn."
Vika snapped her head up and disturbed Solovey into doing the same. "You've got men with more experience, with better marksmanship. Take one of them instead. Don't pity me for having to stay here with Lieutenant Bondarev."
"Better marksmanship? The UPA doesn't have very many men who can shoot Soviets dead from half a kilometer. That's why we have you," said Taras. "Don't make me flatter you further and don't try feeding me more lies. You're qualified. But you're also unnerved by the way Bondarev leers at you."
"All the men do that," she said, rounding the tree to collect her tse-shaped pack. Like all of her meager possessions, it came from the east. From the Soviets, who she was rumored to have deserted from. "Do you think I'm stupid and don't notice?"
"Well, you're paranoid about it to the point you ignored an order. Have your pack and horse ready by dawn tomorrow, and don't drink with your platoon."
"Anything for a free Ukraine."
Taras broke the tension with a laugh. He knew damn well her sobriety wouldn't last.
In his only private conversation with Zarubin, the one that had left him craving another, the Major had advised him to drink not for the temporary euphoria, but because it helped. It could fill the time between stretches of mind-numbing boredom and worked to calm a frantic mind when deep breaths couldn't.
Most of all, drinking blurred the recollections of the dead's glazed eyes and the walls splattered scarlet like an abstract painting.
"Take a cigarette before you go."
A snap and hiss accompanied the matchstick's flame. Both danced towards Vika's heavy cheekbones as she leaned close to Taras's cupped hands.
She finished the cigarette in haste and left it to smolder among frost-bitten leaves. Whorls of mist swallowed her and Solovey's figures whole as they abandoned him beneath the fir in a haze of rustic tobacco.
"Good little nationalist," Taras muttered to himself. He tipped his head back to scan an overcast sky absent of bombers and sparrows. "Always rallying your comrades for the cause."
The dilemma of heading east or west for the morphine haunted Taras until dawn.
West meant crossing enemy lines and facing the fascist invaders in an environment where only German and Polish were spoken. It meant he and Vika would have to infiltrate, steal, and escape without being caught in their lie and without uttering a word to one another.
While the east was closer and would allow them to speak freely, the Soviets had more than one group who wanted them shot against a wall. Pro-Soviet partisans, Red Army soldiers, and agents of the Soviet secret police, who had now started dressing as their own people, would all be pleased to capture them.
It wasn't guaranteed the nearest Soviet evacuation hospital would stock the coveted lend-lease syrettes, either, and Red Army morphine stocks were all but nonexistent.
Both options also carried the potential of having innocent, unaligned Ukrainians become collateral damage—people like Sergeant Andriy Horanchuk and his fourteen-year-old son, Ivan, who the Soviets or Poles had massacred before they could return to the hollow with provisions.
Whoever was responsible had gunned the Horanchuks' horses to slabs, looted their rifles, cartridge belts, and the gold cap on one of Andriy's molars. There was nothing left on either of them aside from a dull tryzub pin, a blood-lashed family portrait, and the charcoal rags of their cobbled together UPA uniforms.
Since Taras had inspected their ambush site, he was the lucky man tasked by Kovalenko with the secondary objective of returning their personal effects. They slid into his pack neatly beside his own: a hip flask brimming with horilka, a collection of Shevchenko poems, and identification booklets from every government possible; Soviet, Polish, and German.
After Volhynia was conquered for the second time, Taras stopped keeping track of which of the passports were government issued and which were counterfeit. Luckily for him, that was the idea. If their origins confused him, they would surely confuse anyone questioning what state he had citizenship in. Therefore, he wouldn't be targeted for any one identity, rather because whoever captured him wouldn't know who the hell he belonged to.
It was foolproof logic, really. Foolproof until whoever had captured him shot him dead instead of wasting anymore time investigating who he truly was.
That thought racked his mind as he shouldered his pack and cut through the dew that dazzled the hollow's footpath. It slid droplet by droplet down branches and snapped twigs, foreshadowing the April thaw that would soon bring extended stretches of daylight and knee-deep mud.
With a wave of warmer temperatures on the way, the nationalists would start revising their plans to ensure caloric surpluses for their winter-starved mounts. Winter greens were about to flood the local markets, meaning pickings would grow fat like the horses, and fatter still with the looming threat of the NKVD.
Taras hoped the trend of civilian contribution would continue. Fear of Soviet rule had pushed civilians to aid the UPA before, and the combat units needed their support more than ever to improve the less than ideal situation in camp.
As he walked up the stake line, Taras counted eight horses as having lethargy and another four as having one too many visible ribs. The three bay mares at the end of the rope drooped their heads and were unwilling to swivel their ears forward to capture the wince of leaves that cropped up from behind him.
"Did you tell Lieutenant Bondarev I'm off to scour the world for drugs with you instead of deserting?"
Vika appeared like an apparition from the pre-dawn shadows. Her pack was slung over one shoulder. Her iron-sighted rifle hung off the other. If the bayonet had been fixed, the rifle would have been taller than her and perhaps given Taras the chance to spot her.
"I did."
Taras had spent what little free time he had last night subjecting himself to the effects of Mykola Bondarev's chain smoking. The dugout they shared—which was more like a caved-in casket with its birch-braced walls—had swelled with the rustic char of makhorka tobacco as Taras's only lieutenant rolled cigarette after cigarette from shredded leaflets.
Taras understood. Like Mykola, he was also a picky bastard who refused to smoke anything finer than the annoyingly rough cut tobacco. Besides, the routine of packing, pinching, and puffing was the most satisfying thing in the world. It'd be insane to abandon it.
But Mykola was another kind of crazy for being able to stand the constant watery eyes and itchy throat that came with it, and crazier still for not slowing down even after his voice had split into a jagged rasp.
"He admitted he'll miss having someone who can shoot out the enemy's eyes from behind for the time being," said Taras.
Vika tipped her head to hide her smile as she checked every dulled fastening on Solovey's tack and saddle bags. "How long will he be without such services?"
"However long it takes to get to Sofiyanivka then the evacuation hospital in Rivne and back."
"Sofiyanivka? In the north? What business do we have there?"
Taras flicked open his breast pocket to fetch the Horanchuks' family portrait. "I have personal effects to return to the sergeant's widow."
"Andriy?" She accepted the photograph. "I thought there was nothing left of him. You reported to headquarters there was nothing but blood at the ambush site, didn't you?"
"Is that what you heard?"
Vika's eyes dropped to Andriy as if he had the answer. Iryna, his wife, accompanied him in the moment captured in black and gray. Her hand sat atop his shoulder and that of their son seated between them.
Taras expected a comment about how Andriy's only son could be classified as his miniature. Father and son shared the same shade of deep umber hair and a heavy brow that arched beneath the brim of mariners' caps. Ivan also had his mother's smile, the kind that jutted out on bottom-heavy lips into something of a pout.
Taras freed himself from the tight stretch of dirt dulled by horse hooves and fetched his flask. Horilka pure as a polished church bell's chime trickled into his palm. He flicked it onto Vika's back. A second handful cascaded over his shoulder in a plea for safe passage.
"Let's sit," he said.
"Sit? Since when are you superstitious?"
"Since the NKVD started wearing UPA uniforms."
"NKVD?" Vika asked, returning the photograph to his breast pocket for safekeeping. "In our uniforms? You really need to start briefing me on more security matters."
"Later. Just sit, will you? We need all the guidance we can get."
They sat cross-legged before the horses. Smoke wafted off the cigarette Taras lit out of habit. After enough longing glances, he conceded and passed it to Vika. She spared him a mention of how badly he was shaking.
The journey seemed simple enough when Taras ran it in his head. Sofiyanivka to Rivne and back. They'd cross the Styr River before dawn on the second morning, then the Horyn once the cover of darkness fell. Neither would be at a formal crossing. There'd be no hooves marks in the sand for any faction to track them by. It'd be as if they were ghosts.
"If we make it back," Vika murmured. "Do you plan to do this before every trip?"
If? That weasel of a word threatened his authority.
Taras turned, hoping she'd look at him. "You're not going to die, Yeryomenko." And when a sharp breath shot out of her lungs like a scoff, "I know that sounds hollow."
"Terribly."
"But you'll be alright considering we've sat before the journey. Now, come on," he said, pulling her to her feet before stepping up into Lastivka's saddle. "Morphine doesn't find itself."
fun fact: that scene break symbol you've been seeing is actually the ukrainian coat of arms. colloquially known as the tryzub, it derives from the seal-trident of volodymyr, the grand prince of kyiv from 960 to 1015. explanations for more historical facts and references like this one can be found in the glossary.
as always, don't forget to vote, comment, and add "scream, nightingale, scream" to your library if you haven't already.
thanks for reading, everyone!